t, with unconscious hypocrisy, her
husband concealed beneath the robes of sanctity, a weary disgust stole
over her,--it stole, it deepened, it increased; it became intolerable
when she discovered that Braddell had knowingly deceived her as to
his worldly substance. In that mood in which she had rushed into these
ominous nuptials, she had had no thought for vulgar advantages; had
Braddell been a beggar, she had married him as rashly. But he, with
the inability to comprehend a nature like hers,--dim not more to her
terrible vices than to the sinister grandeur which made their ordinary
atmosphere,--had descended cunningly to address the avarice he thought
as potent in others as himself, to enlarge on the worldly prosperity
with which Providence had blessed him; and now she saw that her dowry
alone had saved the crippled trader from the bankrupt list. With this
revolting discovery, with the scorn it produced, vanished all Lucretia's
unstable visions of reform. She saw this man a saint amongst his
tribe, and would not believe in the virtues of his brethren, great and
unquestionable as they might have been proved to a more dispassionate
and humbler inquirer. The imposture she detected she deemed universal
in the circle in which she dwelt; and Satan once more smiled upon the
subject he regained. Lucretia became a mother; but their child formed no
endearing tie between the ill-assorted pair,--it rather embittered their
discord. Dimly even then, as she bent over the cradle, that vision,
which now, in the old house at Brompton, haunted her dreams and beckoned
her over seas of blood into the fancied future, was foreshadowed in the
face of her infant son. To be born again in that birth, to live only
in that life, to aspire as man may aspire, in that future man whom she
would train to knowledge and lead to power,--these were the feelings
with which that sombre mother gazed upon her babe. The idea that the
low-born, grovelling father had the sole right over that son's destiny,
had the authority to cabin his mind in the walls of form, bind him down
to the sordid apprenticeship, debased, not dignified, by the solemn
mien, roused her indignant wrath; she sickened when Braddell touched her
child. All her pride of intellect, that had never slept, all her pride
of birth, long dormant, woke up to protect the heir of her ambition, the
descendant of her race, from the defilement of the father's nurture.
Not long after her confinement, she forme